Module 3 Cover Letter

<p>We’re really moving along briskly now. Welcome to the third package of goodies for your Protocol Kit. The theme of this package is <em>danger and safety</em>. Anchoring the collection, we have Nadia Asporouvhova’s <em>Dangerous Protocols</em> and Timber Schroff’s <em>Safe New World</em>.</p> <p>Focusing in particular on internet social technologies, Nadia argues that protocols are no panacea for the ills of a world of platforms; they merely reproduce many of the fundamentally difficult tradeoffs in newer, less legible forms. While they mitigate some of the problems of platforms, they introduce new ones of their own. Among them, she identifies a particularly tough problem — that of protocol participants <em>internalizing</em> protocols and becoming “protocolized” themselves, turning into unconscious inhabitants of infrastructures whose dispositions they cannot quite see. For better or worse, the medium is the message, and new sorts of humans are the message of protocols…</p>